Founding a public charter school in Waimanalo with legendary Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson brings Robert Witt full circle in his own educational journey.

Witt, who also is the executive director of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools, is dedicating what could have been his retirement years to helping island youngsters develop "the mind of a navigator," able to forge a better path for themselves and Hawaii in the 21st century.

It’s a busy time for the startup, Malama Honua Learning Center, which aims to enroll about 75 students in the lower elementary grades next school year.

Over the next few weeks, Witt and Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, will be meeting with the Windward community to explain the school’s mission and to hear community members’ ideas. They’re in the process of hiring a principal, who will recruit the first few teachers, and are finalizing the physical space and developing the curriculum and assessment system.

The school, which will serve as home base during the PVS’ current worldwide voyage and all future voyages, will marry cutting-edge STEM curricula with indigenous cultural values and practices.

Two voyaging canoes will be floating classrooms, with the Hokule‘a serving as the platform to perpetuate ancient traditions and the cultivation of compassion and kindness, and the Hikianalia fitted out as a high-tech research vessel, disseminating scientific data collected from around the world.

Witt, 65, who grew up in Ohio, moved to Hawaii in 1983 to be the administrative director of Honolulu Waldorf School, a post he held until 1989, when he took the helm of the HAIS, a member organization that represents private schools in Hawaii. A widower and the father of two sons, Witt imbued the group with his sense of social justice, expanding its scope and raising its profile. Under his leadership, the HAIS developed a strong affiliation with numerous Hawaii charter schools, which are intended to be laboratories for innovation in public education. Charter schools receive public funding, report to their own school boards and are open to all students, subject to enrollment limits; they do not charge tuition.

The goals of Malama Honua Learning Center, which will add grade levels as students age, fulfill Witt’s professional desire to provide innovative educational opportunities to underserved populations, but his motivation also is deeply personal. One of his sons, Eli, was a marine-science teacher and a crewmember aboard the Hokule‘a; he died of cancer in 2010, at the age of 30.

"This school was Eli’s dream too," says Witt. "Everything I’m doing, I do in his memory."

QUESTION: So you’ve been the head of the independent-school association for so long and you’re founding a public charter school. What inspired you to do that?

ANSWER: I’ve been with the HAIS for almost 25 years, and very early on, 1990 or so, we worked on our mission statement and we said that in addition to supporting and advocating for independent schools and independent education, we would participate actively in the broader educational dialogue in our community. That’s always been very important to me. So over those years I don’t think there’s ever been a time when HAIS wasn’t working actively with independent schools and also on public education issues, although not necessarily a particular school.

Q: Is HAIS’ support for early education — universal preschool — an example of that?

A: Yes. Absolutely. I support the governor’s blueprint. The level of interest in that issue that we’re seeing now is the outcome of probably at least five or six years of steadily more intensive work and focus on early-ed. My board is made up of independent school heads for the most part, and their primary focus is on their schools, of course. But to their credit — and I think this is more true today than it was 20 years ago — they are also

focused on what we call the public purposes of private schools, dedicated to this notion that private schools have a larger role to play in our community.

Q: What do you mean by public purpose?

A: For me, the highest expression of public purpose is when educators from both public and private schools take the time to sit down and design collaborative initiatives which focus on enhancing teaching and learning for all children in Hawaii. …

Q: One more question on this topic, before we get to the new charter school. This idea of public purpose has always been a driving force for you, as you said. But this broad view isn’t always typical in your type of position. What is it about you and your experience that makes it so important?

A: I think you’re right that the other associations like ours across the country are not as intensively focused on public purpose as we are. However, that’s changing. The National Association of Independent Schools in D.C., which is our parent organization, has been providing leadership to state and regional associations to engage more in public purpose. So having said that, why did I start this 24 years ago? I really don’t know. Probably because I went to public schools all my life. I grew up in Ohio and I went to public elementary, went to a public high school and went to a public university. … The other thing is that growing up in the 1960s as I did, during the civil rights movement, there was a strong commitment to social justice. That’s just part of who I am. It’s a driver for me, a spark, a catalyst. Being part of the Malama Honua Learning Center is a way to express my belief that all human beings are inherently good and capable of achieving at the highest level — everyone — if given a good education.

Q: Were you ever a teacher?

A: Yes, very early in my career. I taught the young ones … preschool, kindergarten, first, second, third and fourth. My notion was and still is "the younger the children, the greater the impact." … The conditions for success in school begin very early. One of my mentors when I first moved here was Pinky Thompson. We lived right down the street from him. He was a fierce advocate for early education in all of his various roles, when he was at the Department of Human Services a long time ago or as a trustee at Kamehameha Schools. He was out there heroically stating the case for young children. … Right now, we have a huge opportunity gap because children with challenging economic and social conditions, from the day they are born, miss out on the kinds of learning opportunities that they need to succeed later in life.

Q: HAIS has been involved for a while with the public charter schools, especially the Native Hawaiian ones, right?

A: Yes. We played a role in helping to pass legislation in 2002 that allowed Kamehameha Schools to invest some of its resources into charter schools with Hawaiian enrollment. … Also, HAIS is the local representative of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and we run a full-scale accreditation program every year. We’ve helped a number of these charter schools through the process to achieve full WASC accreditation. So yes, there’s an affinity and affiliation with the charter schools. …

Q: What was the inspiration specifically for Malama Honua Learning Center?

A: Several years ago, a group associated with the Polynesian Voyaging Society was meeting once a month, people who resonated with this notion of voyaging as an educational philosophy. And we wrote up a mission statement about how Hokule’a in its worldwide voyage would generate a new approach to teaching and learning around the world. And then one day right in the middle of our discussion, Nainoa stopped and said, "Something is missing. We really haven’t talked enough about the children right here in Hawaii, and how they fit into the voyage." And, of course, that was a key question. Out of that came the notion that the voyage must be responsible for creating new and better approaches in our schools here, particularly for children of Hawaiian ancestry and particularly for other underserved groups of children.

Q: So it’s a journey for more than the people who are actually on the canoes?

A: Yes. We see it as transformative. Nainoa and I both believe that as we finished the 20th century and moved into the 21st century, the world changed, dramatically. Globalization, technology, all those things that everybody talks about. So if you think about that in terms of voyaging, we needed to come up with a new educational destination. … We asked ourselves this question: What will children in Hawaii who are in school today need to know and be able to do as adults? We settled on seven main capacities. Then we distilled that, from a wayfinding point of view, into what has become our guiding principle: We want to help students develop the mind of a navigator. The mind of a navigator is one capable of generating the right questions and the right solutions to urgent issues in our lives. Mainly issues of environmental justice and social justice. We want to develop young people who will take responsibility for others and for the earth. That’s a keystone for us.

Q: What are the seven capacities?

A: Analytical and creative thinking and problem-solving; complex oral and written communication; leadership and teamwork; digital and quantitative literacy; global perspective; adaptability, initiative and risk-taking; and integrity and ethical decision-making. At Malama Honua, voyaging — wayfinding in the 21st century — will be the cultural framework for learning all of that.

Q: And because you are a charter school, you will attract families who want their children educated with that mindset, that philosophy?

A: Yes. Have you read Paul Hawken’s book, "Blessed Unrest" ? The key idea in there, which we picked up on, is that environmental justice and social justice are the same thing. So Malama Honua, which is the mission of the worldwide voyage and the name of our school, basically takes that concept and puts it to work.

We’re saying that our students will grow up to possess the mind of the navigator and be uniquely prepared to take better care of the earth and to take better care of one another.

So these children can grow up, go off to college and then come back and have the ability to see new things, new possibilities, previously unheard-of solutions. This is the opposite of preparing them for a job. I’m not interested in preparing young people for jobs that already exist. I think that young people should have the opportunity to create new social and economic initiatives. They need to be entrepreneurs, they need to be research-oriented. They need to have a strong science background, they need to be good communicators. … Ultimately I’d like to see us in Hawaii create an incubator for kids who come home with a good idea, to help them launch it.

There are children out there in Waimanalo right now who have the capacity to do truly great things. We want to help them do it.

Q: These are very big ideas.

A: Yes, and it’s a lot more than educators usually talk about in kindergarten. At any school, parents are concerned about the usual things. They want their child to have a friend. They want their kids to do well in school. They want them to go to a good college. Yes, yes, of course. I also want them to be the champions, the heroes, the navigators, for a healthy community here in Hawaii. That’s the dream.